A Micro-Service Approach to Cloud Native RAN for 5G and Beyond

5G aims to support diverse applications with programmable infrastructure. Traditional RAN based on purpose-built-in hardware and monolithic software lack resiliency, programmability, and business agility. Cloud native virtualized RAN (vRAN) solves the issues by designing telecom applications into micro-service in cloud environment. This enables flexible virtualized network function deployment, efficient service provisioning, and on-demand resource usage. However, designing telecom RAN applications as micro-services has no guidelines but faces challenges such as high-precision synchronization and real-time processing requirements. This paper first introduces cloud native tenets and the current state of RAN cloudification and then evaluates the micro-service design of RAN software components. A micro-service approach for vDU user plane was proposed in this study, and a vDU prototype was developed based on the Intel x86 computing platform. System validation results proved the feasibility of inter-Pod communication processing latency, and capacity analytics predicted substantial capacity improvement for the proposed vDU scheme. The paper concludes with a summary and open points on the way forward for cloud native vRAN transformation.